The spate of heavy rainstorms that swept across California during January’s early weeks exposed a lot of problems: weak bridges, inadequate reservoir capacity, poor drainage on many city streets and helplessness in the face of inevitable mudslides, to name just a few.
The rains revealed nothing more starkly than the failure so far of California’s many programs to help most of the homeless, a failure that exposed how useless most of the more than $11 billion allocated for homeless aid over the last year has been. One video, shot in the stormy early morning hours of Jan. 5, says a lot about this (you can see it on YouTube at